The Jewish Week - 04.01.2005

The Jewish Week

U.S. Shoah Museum Gets Dissed 

James D. Besser/Washington 

All of a sudden, it seems, the world of Holocaust commemoration is getting intensely competitive. 

Staffers at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and members of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council were dismayed by the recent comments of Yad Vashem chief Avner Shalev, who in an interview in Haaretz about the much-publicized opening of its new Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem called the Washington museum a “dwarf.” 

Shalev touted his museum’s leadership in scholarship and education and dismissed the museum in Washington. 

“They have always presented themselves as Yad Vashem’s aunt,” Shalev said. “In an interview there, I said that we, Yad Vashem, are the mother and they are the little girl. That riled them. But I still say that there is no comparison between Yad Vashem and the Holocaust Museum in Washington. We are giants, they are dwarfs.” 

This week the “dwarfs” maintained a stoic silence, saying they did not want to start a fight between sister institutions. And soon after the Haaretz report, Shalev sent a letter of apology to Fred Zeidman, the council chair. 

A conciliatory Zeidman accepted the apology and said he is “sorry the incident happened. And I assured him that this museum will never criticize another Holocaust institution. I told him we are in a single, sacred cause.” 

That cause will be on display next week when the D.C. museum gets a prominent visitor: Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, who came to power in last November’s “Orange Revolution.” 

Yushchenko, whose election the Bush administration is touting as proof that its focus on international democracy building is working, will visit the museum Wednesday, thanks to the efforts of NCSJ, the Soviet Jewry group. 

Museum officials say the Ukrainian leader reacted emotionally during his first visit several years ago — in part because his father, a Soviet POW, was interned at Auschwitz. “He became particularly emotional when he saw the railroad car [used to transport Jews to the death camp] and the displays on the ‘selection’ process,” said a museum official. 

But tourism isn’t the only thing on the agenda for the president’s Washington visit. The Ukrainians are appealing to Washington to “graduate” them from requirements of the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment, which links favorable trade status to human rights performance. An NCSJ source said his group will be “supportive, but we’re also making it clear they have to keep moving forward on combating anti-Semitism.” 

He said Jewish leaders expect to talk to Yushchenko “about a number of issues, including the ongoing development of Jewish communal life and restitution of Jewish communal property.”